It's Time for a Pop Quiz

Okay. So the electorate of this great Country has spoken and Senator Obama is the President-elect. According to his running mate and Vice President-elect, Senator Biden, that means “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy . . . watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Well the “world” may already be testing the new President-elect. The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, announced in his state of the nation speech that Russia will deploy short-range missiles near Poland, apparently in response to Poland’s decision to “play” with us in a missile defense system. President Medvedev explained the need to deploy the missiles by saying, “From what we have seen in recent years – the creation of a missile defense system, the encirclement of Russia with military bases, the relentless expansion of NATO – we have gotten the clear impression that they are testing our strength.” Russia sees the presence of a missile defense system in Poland and in the Czech Republic as a threat to them, rather as a means to neutralize a missile threat from Iran.

It looks like Russia has decided to test President-elect Obama’s strength with a pop-quiz a couple of months before he’s even inaugurated. Russia’s timing is impeccable. They decide to deploy these short-range missiles when we have an unpopular President who is just finishing out his term of office and doesn’t want to take any extraordinary measures and when his successor has just been elected and may not want to “weigh-in” on possible actions or responses because he’s still riding the euphoria of winning the election (and because he’s still almost 3 months away from sitting in the hot seat). So do we have a missile-crisis-in-the-making? How will President-elect Obama answer this, the first, of the world’s tests?